of it! I stopped listening. I wouldn’t let them work me up into a state. I just sat there like a lump and told them to piss off at regular intervals.’
‘They must have loved it,’ I said dryly.
‘You’re taking the mickey!’
‘Indeed, I’m not,’ I assured him. ‘I think you were great.’
‘I was young,’ he said cheerfully. ‘They kept waking me up in the night. Silly sods didn’t realise I was often up half the night with sick horses. Colic. Stuff like that. I just nodded off when they frothed on about Sonia. It narked them no end.’
‘Mm,’ I agreed, and asked tentatively, ‘Did you see… Sonia… I mean… er.’
‘Did I see her hanging? No, I didn’t. I saw her in the morgue, hours after they took her down. They’d made her look peaceful by then.’
‘So it wasn’t you who found her?’
‘No. Reckon I was lucky, there. One of my stable lads found her while I was driving north to York races. The police drove me back and they’d already decided I’d killed her. She’d been in a box we weren’t using at that point. The lad that found her brought his food up for a week after, poor sod.’
‘Did you think she’d hanged herself?’
‘It wasn’t like her.’ He showed a very long-lived old doubt. ‘There was a stack of hay bales there she could have jumped off of.’ He shook his head. ‘No one ever did know the truth of it and, tell you no lie, it’s better that way. I read in that Drumbeat rag that you’re trying to find out. Well, I’d just as soon you didn’t, to be honest. I don’t want my wife and Lucy stirred up. Not fair to them, it isn’t. You just get on and make up what story you like for your film. As long as you don’t make out I killed her, it’ll be all right with me.’
‘In the film you do not kill her,’ I said.
‘That’s fine, then.’
‘But I have to say why she died.’
He said without heat, ‘I told you, I don’t know why she died.’
‘Yes, I know you did, but you must have thought about it.’
He gave me an unadulteratedly carefree smile and no information, and I had a clear picture of what the interrogating police had faced all those years ago; a happy unbroachable brick wall.
‘In Howard Tyler’s book,’ I said, ‘Yvonne daydreams about jockey lovers. Where… I mean… have you any idea where he got that idea?’
Internally this time, Jackson Wells laughed. ‘Howard Tyler didn’t ask me about that.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘He told me he hadn’t tried to see you at all.’
‘No, he didn’t. First I knew of it, people were saying that that book, Unstable Times, was about me and Sonia.’
‘And did she… well… daydream?’
Again the secret, intense amusement, ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘She might have done. That whole marriage, it was a sort of make-believe. We were kids playing at grown-ups. That writer, he got us dead wrong. I’m not complaining, mind.’
‘But the dream lovers are so striking,’ I persisted. ‘Where did He get the idea?’
Jackson Wells thought it over without any apparent anxiety.
‘I reckon,’ he told me at length, ‘you should ask that stuck-up sister of hers.’
‘Sister… do you mean Rupert Visborough’s widow?’
He nodded. ‘Audrey. Sonia’s sister. Audrey was married to a member of the Jockey Club and never let me forget it. Audrey told Sonia not to waste herself on me. I wasn’t good enough for her, see?’ He grinned, not caring. ‘When I read that book I heard Audrey’s prissy voice all through it.’
Stunned by the simple depth of that perception I sat in silence wondering what to ask him next; wondering whether I should or could ask why the hanging death of an obscure young sister-in-law had so thoroughly and permanently blighted Rupert Visborough’s chances of political life.
How unacceptable in Westminster, in fact, were mysteriously dead relations? Disreputable family misfortunes might prove an embarrassment, but if the sins of sons and daughters could be forgiven, surely the more distant unsolved death should have been but a hiccup.
Before I’d found the words, the door opened to reveal Lucy, sunny like her father.
‘Mum wants to know if you want anything, like for instance drinks.’
I took it as the dismissal Mum had intended, and stood up.
Jackson Wells introduced me to his daughter with ‘Lucy, this is Thomas Lyon, the personification-of-evil film-maker, according to yesterday’s Drumbeat.’
Her eyes widened and, with her father’s quiet mischief, she said, ‘I saw you on the telly with